Paul Green's 'The Gestalt Bunker' and 'Directions to the Dead End' (audio writing from 1971)

Check out "The Gestalt Bunker" and "Directions to the Dead End" at
http://www.culturecourt.com/Audio/PG/PGaudio.htm .

Particularly "The Gestalt Bunker". This is audio work from 1971 by Britain's Paul Green. It's
some of the best audio writing you'll encounter and remains relevant after all this time,
particularly to artists working with electronic technology. It also evokes an atmosphere of
conflict that is all too familiar at the moment.

It was one of the DNA audio works Lawrence Russell published.

About DNA:

"DNA, 1971. Writing plays to be performed in darkness evolved quickly into just taping them,
especially the monologue. My idea for a free tape exchange came, in part, from Dana Atchley, an
American conceptual artist who asked me to contribute a page to his Space Atlas, after he heard
my taped theatre piece Black Movie in 1970 during a lunch-time venue at UVic. Space Atlas was a
random compendium of graphics, poetry, musings, and utter crap that a hundred various artists
were invited to do something for. You gave Dana two copies of whatever page you wrote, drew or
puked on, and got two copies of the Space Atlas back [a looseleaf binder]. Keep one, give one
away… shuffle the contents… rip out the ones you didn't like. That piece of coarse-grain
sandpaper… the Trojan glued to a piece of cardboard. Perfect. The complete anti-institutional
statement, where formalism and aesthetic judgement were discarded in favour of randomness and
simplicity.

The content didn't interest me greatly even though as a dramatist and short fiction writer I was
attracted to some form of random event in narrative. It was the method of distribution that
showed a way to beat the slavery of institutional recognition, a sort of art chain letter or
pyramid. If the xerox copier could make one a publisher, what could the tape recorder do?

Far as I know, DNA was the first audio magazine of this sort anywhere. Send in a cassette or
reel, get back some DNA. A lot of these tapes were played on Listener-Subscription fm stations
across the US and Canada, and for a while DNA was a counter-culture success, copied and played
in music schools, theatres, galleries… and those orbiting attics were people liked to listen.
[LR, '03]"
from http://www.culturecourt.com/Audio/DNA/classics.htm

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